Category Archives: DNA

Reconstructing dinosaurs from ancient DNA has been dealt a blow with a new study finding genetic material can only last 1 million years.

An international team of researchers reached the finding after analysing DNA extracted from bones of the extinct New Zealand moa.

They found that while short fragments of DNA could possibly survive up to 1 million years, sequences of 30 base pairs or more would only have a half-life of around 158,000 years under certain conditions.

Lead author Dr Morten Allentoft from Murdoch University's Ancient DNA lab in Perth says their results contradict earlier studies which claimed to have extracted DNA fragments several hundred base pairs long from dinosaur bones and preserved insects, claims which underpinned the storyline of the 1993 movieJurassic Park.

"What we show here with the decay rate of DNA is that this is never going to be possible," Dr Allentoft said.

"It may be that you can have extremely short fragments of DNA, only a few base pairs that persist for maybe a million years, maybe even longer."

Dr Allentoft says the earlier findings may have been due to contamination with human DNA.

Rate of decay

The latest study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, also establishes a DNA decay rate which could help identify specimens likely to yield useful genetic material.

It might also one day enable DNA to be used to date bones and teeth or even be used for forensic investigation of human remains.

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DNA dating study kills off Jurassic Park

BOCA RATON, FL--(Marketwire - Oct 10, 2012) - DNA Brands, Inc. ( OTCBB : DNAX ), makers of the great tasting DNA Energy Drink, a favorite of the action sports community and its enthusiastic followers, announced today it is re-branding its entire line of DNA Energy Drinks to be able to reach a greater portion of the ever-growing energy drink market.

Darren Marks, President of DNA Brand, Inc., stated, "The one comment we hear over and over is that energy drinks don't taste good. We were previously selected as the best tasting energy drink by an independent international World Beverage Competition. We intend to get this fact out to the energy drink consumer. Our current graphics were primarily geared to the action sports community. Although we will continue to pursue these same customers, we will do it with new and innovative products geared to better communicate the brand's core identity while appealing to a much broader demographic; active consumers from every walk of life. We are confident that this rebranding will enable us to better position ourselves in a category that continues to re-invent itself and grow at a rapid pace. Energy drink sales increased 17.2% in 2011, the highest growth rate since 2007." In conjunction with the re-branding, Jeff Jonke has been promoted to the Company's Executive Vice-President and General Manger. He will be the driving force behind this new and exciting time for DNA Brands, Inc.

About DNA Brands, Inc.

DNA BRANDS, makers of DNA Energy Drink, the award-winning, best-tasting energy drink at the 2010 World Beverage Competition, is a proprietary blend of quality ingredients in four flavors: Citrus, Lemon Lime, Sugar Free Citrus and CRANRAZBERRY. DNA can be found at independent retailers throughout the state of Florida, as well as national retailers including Walgreens, Race Trac and Circle K. Distribution is primarily through Grass Roots Beverage, the Company's wholly owned subsidiary and select Miller and Anheuser-Bush distributors in select markets.

DNA is a proud sponsor of many action sport teams. True to its action sports roots, DNA BRANDS, INC. has earned national recognition through its sponsorship of the DNA Energy Drink/Jeff Ward Racing team where it competes on a world-class level in Supercross and Motocross, reaching millions of fans. DNA Energy Drink can also be found in other action sports such as Surfing, BMX, Wakeboarding and Skateboarding and its athletes are recognized stars in their own right.

For more information about DNA Energy Drink, its athletes and sponsorships, please visit http://www.dnabrandsusa.com or contact: Darren M. Marks, President (954) 970 3826 darren@dnaenergydrink.com

Safe Harbor Forward-Looking Statements

To the extent that statements in this press release are not strictly historical, including statements as to revenue projections, business strategy, outlook, objectives, future milestones, plans, intentions, goals, future financial conditions, future collaboration agreements, the success of the Company's development, events conditioned on stockholder or other approval, or otherwise as to future events, such statements are forward-looking, and are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The forward-looking statements contained in this release are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from the statements made.

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DNA Brands to Re-Brand and Undertake New Marketing Campaign

In "Jurassic Park," scientists extract 80-million-year-old dino DNA from the bellies of mosquitoes trapped in amber. Researchers may never be able to extract genetic material that old and bring a T. rex back to life, but a new study suggests DNA can survive in fossils longer than previously believed.

The oldest DNA samples ever recovered are from insects and plants in ice cores in Greenland up to 800,000 years old. But researchers had not been able to determine the oldest possible DNA they could get from the fossil record because DNA's rate of decay had remained a mystery.

Now scientists in Australia report they've been able to estimate this rate based on a comparison of DNA from 158 fossilized leg bones from three species of the moa, an extinct group of flightless birds that once lived in New Zealand. The bones date between 600 and 8,000 years old and importantly all come from the same region.

Temperatures, oxygenation and other environmental factors make it difficult to detect a basic rate of degradation, researcher Mike Bunce, from Murdoch University's Ancient DNA lab in Perth, explained in a statement.

"The moa bones however have allowed us to study the comparative DNA degradation because they come from different ages from a region where they have all experienced the same environmental conditions," Bunce said.

Based on this study, Bunce and his team put DNA's half-life at 521 years, meaning half of the DNA bonds would be broken down 521 years after death, and half of the remaining bonds would be decayed another 521 years after that, and so on. This rate is 400 times slower than simulation experiments predicted, the researchers said, and it would mean that under ideal conditions, all the DNA bonds would be completely destroyed in bone after about 6.8 million years.

"If the decay rate is accurate then we predict that DNA fragments of sufficient length will preserve in frozen fossil bone of around one million years in age," Bunce said.

But he cautioned that more research is needed to examine the other variables in the breakdown of DNA.

"Other factors that impact on DNA preservation include storage time following excavation, soil chemistry and even the time of year when the animal died," Bunce said in a statement. "We hope to refine predictions of DNA survival by more accurately mapping how DNA fragments decay across the globe."

The study was published Oct. 10 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

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'Jurassic Park' May Be Impossible, But Dino DNA Lasts Longer Than Thought

Steve Wisbauer/Getty Images

DNA from a cigarette butt left near a rape scene in 2011 links a Staten Island man to a brutal 1998 rape.

A Staten Island man who raped and robbed a college professor nearly 14 years ago, holding a piece of broken glass to her neck, pleaded guilty to the heinous crime on Tuesday, after being busted by DNA from a cigarette he discarded near the scene of another sexual assault.

Lerio Guerrero, 34, tossed a cigarette butt near the scene of a 2011 sexual assault in Brooklyn. While he was never charged in that rape, police arrested him for trespassing and matched his DNA to the cigarette.

A search of the state DNA database came up with a hit from the rape on Orchard St. on a chilly November night back in 1998.

A masked Guerrero pushed a 28-year-old professor as she stepped into her apartment building, then raped and sodomized her.

Not satisfied with just brutalizing her and taking what was left in her wallet, the sicko dragged her to an ATM to steal her money.

"He held a piece of broken glass against her neck. He said there was not enough money in her wallet," said Assistant District Attorney Martha Bashford. The prosecutor said he made her call her credit card company to allow him to steal more money out of her account.

He robbed her of $800, but as he forced her to a second ATM, the victim was able to break free and get help.

Without having the name of a suspect, in 2005 prosecutors indicted just the DNA extracted from the blood he left behind on the victim's coat when he cut his hand on the jagged piece of glass.

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DNA from cigarette solves 1998 rape

ScienceDaily (Oct. 9, 2012) Many diseases, including cancers, leave genetic clues in the body just as criminals leave DNA at the scene of a crime. But tools to detect the DNA-like sickness clues known as miRNAs, tend to be slow and expensive. Now a chemist and a biologist from University of Copenhagen have invented a method that promises to shave days off the lab work done to reveal diseases, using cheap methods and easy to use analytical apparatuses.

Chemistry researcher Tom Vosch and plant molecular biologist Seong Wook Yang invented a DNA sensor, coupling genetic material to a luminous molecule which goes dark only in the presence of a specific target. Details on their invention, Silver Nano cluster DNA-probes, are published in the high profile scientific journal ACS Nano, and Tom Vosch is understandably proud of the invention.

"We invented a probe that emits light only as long as the sample is clean. That is an unusually elegant and easy way to screen for a particular genetic target," says Vosch of the Department of Chemistry's Nano Science Centre.

DNA clues help detect disease

You could say that the inventors took their cue from crime detection. In murder cases police technicians use DNA to identify the killer. Similarly Individuals with disease are likely to have a unique miRNA profile. Any disease that is attacking a patient leaves this genetic clue all over the victim. And because the profiles of miRNAs vary by type of cancer, finding it proves beyond a reasonable doubt what made the patient sick.

Gene magnets stick to opposites

The new detection method exploits a natural quality of genetic material. A single DNA strand is made up of molecules, so called bases, ordered in a unique combination. When two strands join to form their famous double helix, they do so by sticking to complementary copies of themselves. Likewise strands tailored to match particular miRNAs will stick to the real thing with uncanny precision. But detecting this union of the strands was only made possible when Vosch and Yang paired their skills.

A real kill switch

Tom Vosch is specialized in studying molecules that light up. Seong Wook Yang is specialized in miRNA. Together they figured out how to attach the light emitting molecules to DNA sensors for miRNA detection. Vosch and Yang discovered, that when these luminous DNA-strands stick with microRNA-strands, their light is snuffed out, giving a very visible indication that the target miRNA is present in the sample. In other words: When the light goes out, the killer is in the house.

Likely to lead to high speed cancer diagnostics

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Glowing DNA invention points towards high speed disease detection

HAPPIER TIMES: Lloyd and Corryn Rayney on a family holiday in Canada in late 2003-early 2004. Source: PerthNow

A DNA expert based in London was called in to investigate whether Lloyd Rayney or another, unidentified "person of interest" were involved in the 2007 death of Mr Rayney's estranged wife, Supreme Court registrar Corryn Rayney.

But tests by forensic scientist Rosalyn Treliving did not shed any light on who may have been responsible for Mrs Rayney's death.

Ms Treliving, who specialises in the analysis of body fluids and the interpretation of DNA profiles, was asked by Major Crime Squad officers to examine hairs, DNA extracts and a handkerchief collected from crime scenes related to the case.

In a written statement tendered to the Supreme Court in Perth, she said her DNA tests were to "assist in addressing the issue" of whether Mr Rayney or a second person - whose name has been withheld - were involved in Mrs Rayney's death on August 7, 2007.

She said she understood Mr Rayney and the second individual were both "persons of interest" in the investigation.

The prominent Perth barrister has been on trial for three months charged with wilfully murdering his wife at the family home in Como on the night of August 7, 2007.

Prosecutors have alleged that Mr Rayney killed Mrs Rayney at their home before placing her body in the back of her State-issued car and driving to Kings Park where he buried her in a clandestine bush grave.

He has pleaded not guilty.

Ms Treliving said she examined hair and DNA extracts from Mrs Rayney's car; hair samples from outside the Rayneys' Como home; a handkerchief found in Mrs Rayney's grave; DNA from a tree branch near the gravesite and DNA extracts from hairs found at the grave, on Mrs Rayney's clothing and in the body bag in which she was placed after being removed from the grave.

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Rayney trial: London expert's DNA tests proved nothing

A new study is finally laying to rest the debate over whether DNA from the age of the dinosaurs could survive to the present day.

Scientists at Murdoch University led a study which shows the rate of DNA degradation and calculates that all bonds in a DNA strand preserved at the ideal temperature of minus five degrees centigrade would be completely destroyed in bone after approximately 6.8 million years.

This figure is incompatible with the idea of finding intact DNA in an 80 million year old dinosaur remnant, as was famously alluded to in the Steven Spielberg film Jurassic Park, but is much older than the currently accepted record of 450,000 to 800,000-year-old DNA from Greenlandic ice cores.

Dr Mike Bunce and Dr Morten Allentoft from Murdoch Universitys Ancient DNA lab came to their conclusions after studying 158 fossilised leg bones belonging to three species of the moa, an extinct group of birds that once roamed New Zealand.

It has been agonisingly difficult to estimate the rate of DNA decay before now because finding a large set of DNA-containing fossils with which to make meaningful comparisons are exceedingly rare, said Dr Bunce.

Environmental conditions like temperature, degree of microbial attack and oxygenation, can affect the DNA decay process and make it hard to detect a basic rate of degradation.

The moa bones however have allowed us to study the comparative DNA degradation because they come from different ages from a region where they have all experienced the same environmental conditions.

The fossil bone specimens were carbon dated as being between 600 and 8000 years old and looking at the varying degrees of DNA degradation in each specimen, the team were able to calculate a DNA half-life of 521 years. The half-life is the amount of time taken for an amount of DNA to reach 50 per cent of the starting amount.

The scientists found that the estimated decay rate in the specimens was almost 400 times slower than predicted from simulation experiments carried out in the lab.

Based on these calculations and other investigations, the team were able to make their predictions of DNA survival deeper into time.

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Mystery of DNA decay unravelled

Palaeogeneticist Morten Allentoft used the bones of extinct moa birds to calculate the half-life of DNA.

M. Mhl

Few researchers have given credence to claims that samples of dinosaur DNA have survived to the present day, but no one knew just how long it would take for genetic material to fall apart. Now, a study of fossils found in New Zealand is laying the matter to rest and putting paid to hopes of cloning a Tyrannosaurus rex.

After cell death, enzymes start to break down the bonds between the nucleotides that form the backbone of DNA, and micro-organisms speed the decay. In the long run, however, reactions with water are thought to be responsible for most bond degradation. Groundwater is almost ubiquitous, so DNA in buried bone samples should, in theory, degrade at a set rate.

Determining that rate has been difficult because it is rare to find large sets of DNA-containing fossils with which to make meaningful comparisons. To make matters worse, variable environmental conditions such as temperature, degree of microbial attack and oxygenation alter the speed of the decay process.

But palaeogeneticists led by Morten Allentoft at the University of Copenhagen and Michael Bunce at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, examined 158 DNA-containing leg bones belonging to three species of extinct giant birds called moa. The bones, which were between 600 and 8,000 years old, had been recovered from three sites within 5 kilometres of each other, with nearly identical preservation conditions including a temperature of 13.1 C. The findings are published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B1.

By comparing the specimens' ages and degrees of DNA degradation, the researchers calculated that DNA has a half-life of 521 years. That means that after 521 years, half of the bonds between nucleotides in the backbone of a sample would have broken; after another 521 years half of the remaining bonds would have gone; and so on.

The team predicts that even in a bone at an ideal preservation temperature of 5 C, effectively every bond would be destroyed after a maximum of 6.8 million years. The DNA would cease to be readable much earlier perhaps after roughly 1.5 million years, when the remaining strands would be too short to give meaningful information.

This confirms the widely held suspicion that claims of DNA from dinosaurs and ancient insects trapped in amber are incorrect, says Simon Ho, a computational evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney in Australia. However, although 6.8 million years is nowhere near the age of a dinosaur bone which would be at least 65 million years old We might be able to break the record for the oldest authentic DNA sequence, which currently stands at about half a million years, says Ho.

The calculations in the latest study were quite straightforward, but many questions remain.

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DNA has a 521-year half-life

STONY BROOK, NY--(Marketwire - Oct 9, 2012) - Applied DNA Sciences, Inc. ( OTCBB : APDN ), (Twitter: @APDN), a provider of DNA-based anti-counterfeiting technology and product authentication solutions, announced today that 3SI Security Systems is expanding its use of APDN's SigNature DNA evidence marking product into 3SI smoke and dye cash protection systems used across Europe. First orders, to the banking sector, are already being processed.

3SI Security Systems is a world leader in cash protection systems designed to recover stolen cash and high-value assets, apprehend criminals and deter crime.

The smoke and dye system, called Thinpac, is already in use in over 130,000 locations worldwide, with great success at deterring crime. 3SI called the addition of SigNature DNA marking to the Thinpac "a unique and leading edge security feature which we are happy to be able to offer to our customers." The company points out that "SigNature-DNA-tagged items can be identified unequivocally with a marker unique to a specific Thinpac, and hence unique to a particular crime. Any item, cash or person that comes in contact with the smoke will be marked by the SigNature DNA."

Police forces across Europe are becoming more familiar with the use of unique SigNature DNA markers in cash-protection systems, placing them in a much better position to catch and convict criminals. SigNature DNA provides police with a welcome additional investigative tool, which often reduces the amount of time it takes the police to undertake such investigations.

James Hayward, Chairman and CEO of Applied DNA Sciences, said, "Our SigNature DNA product is now used in many countries across Europe and is increasingly popular with police. One of our best examples of how the police make excellent use of our DNA to catch criminals is in the United Kingdom where 48 criminals have already been convicted and jailed for over 242 years, providing a great deterrent that has helped to significantly reduce the number of Cash in Transit robberies."

SigNature DNA is used to protect approximately 26% of cash movements in the United Kingdom.

Protection of bank tellers adds to APDN's portfolio of cash protection products. 3SI already uses APDN SigNature DNA marks to protect nearly 5,000 ATMs, using a DNA liquid which is placed in ink tanks that are fitted inside individual ATM cassettes. The cassette activates when triggered, marking all the cash inside the ATM and the criminals.

David Stanks, CEO of 3SI Corporation noted, "We have proven that we can significantly extend the value of our solutions by including the SigNature DNA products. This is a logical continuation of our strategy to deter crime and protect people."

About Applied DNA Sciences

APDN is a provider of botanical-DNA based security and authentication solutions that can help protect products, brands and intellectual property of companies, governments and consumers from theft, counterfeiting, fraud and diversion. SigNature DNA and smartDNA, our principal anti-counterfeiting and product authentication solutions that essentially cannot be copied, provide a forensic chain of evidence and can be used to prosecute perpetrators.

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Applied DNA Sciences and 3SI Use DNA to Protect Teller Stations

During the last three years, a skull and two femur or thigh bones have been found off the Wexford and Waterford coasts.

Garda authorities were informed by their detectives that special DNA testing in England was required as testing in Ireland had not managed to extract the DNA and identify the remains.

Garda were also told it is possible the remains may be some of the crew of either the Pere Charles, the Maggie B or the Honey Dew II.

The bodies of nine men from those tragedies were never recovered.

Garda say the cases are still being actively investigated and the matter has been raised in the Dil.

John Hennessy, a brother of the Pere Charles skipper Tom Hennessy, said the remains are lying in storage in a fridge in Dublin and are still unidentified.

He told RT News that families would be willing to discuss paying to have the bones tested if it was only financial considerations that were stalling the investigation.

Garda were told last year the cost could be up to 12,000 but that included testing on other bones, the identity of which have since been ascertained, so the cost would now be lower.

Mr Hennessy said he believes the Government has handled the situation badly, saying all that the families wanted was to have the two bones and the skull sent to England to see if the DNA can be extracted.

Garda say inquires to establish the identity of the human remains have not yielded any positive results so far.

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Families offer to help with bones' DNA tests